Food mishaps at home are a fact of life because amateur cooks often don't have the correct skills and experience, or even the right equipment to hand. However sometimes even the biggest names slip up from time to time. Here are six instances of such slip ups.

Tyson's image takes heavy blows

Let's start in North Carolina, in the sleepy town of Statesville, first settled in the 1750s, but still with a population of barely 24,000.

This rural backwater hit the headlines for the first time in its history, when a subsidiary of Arkansas-based Tyson Foods sent 210,000 gallons of chicken 'sludge' of fat and feathers spewing into the local creek. Tyson - one of the USA's biggest food producers, with 2014 revenues of more than £37 billion - blamed faulty valves, but its public image took much longer to repair than they did.

Kraft plant gets its sums all wrong

The 'too big to fail' adage took another battering in 2014 when one of North America's best-known food manufacturers was forced to recall a whopping 1.2 million cases of cottage cheese products.

Kraft Foods had been churning out the product, loved by calorie-conscious consumers, for almost three months, from its California plant, before it twigged the cheese hadn't been stored at the correct temperature.

How exactly that happened was never revealed and the US media was typically generous to one of its own, by not asking too loudly.

Health scare sparks boardroom nut-rage

Macadamia nuts have made news in 2015, after a senior Korean Air Executive berated cabin staff on one of its jets, because she wasn't happy at how they had presented her snack.

However, Cleveland-based Kanan Enterprises have been suffering a different form of 'nut rage', after discovering that its 16 oz pouches of macadamias might be contaminated by salmonella.

Incredibly, for a business with annual revenues not far south of $40 million, they had been sending shipments out from November 2014 to March 2015 before the problem was spotted, but luckily, no health issues were reported.

Doctor … there's something wrong with these labels

It's back to California for this unfortunate incident in June 2015, when one of the USA's largest manufacturers of vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free frozen foods got its packaging wrong - and spectacularly so.

Dr Praeger's Sensible Foods got its quirky name because it was established 20 years ago, by two surgeons who wanted people to eat more healthily.

Somehow though, it dispatched 950 retail cases of its California Veggie Burger, which contained soya, but didn't say so on the label.

The company later blamed a glitch in its packaging system - even though it's been selling the same product for eight years.

Horse-meat blunder left major brands cowed

Of course, when it comes to food manufacturing mishaps, we can never afford to get smug on this side of the Atlantic.

Our largest food scare for decades saw several High Street supermarket brands discover that horse-meat had become an unwanted ingredient in some ready-meals, including their lasagne.

Meat-lovers in many countries are perfectly happy to be served a plate of horse, but not in the UK, and most definitely not when it's labelled as minced beef. Tesco, Aldi and Findus were forced to spend months, and millions of pounds, trying to restore public confidence as a result.

What's in a name? Genius finds out the hard way

The latest mishap came as the nation basked in the hottest weekend of the year.

The Food Standards Agency sent dark clouds scudding over five of the UK's biggest supermarkets, after warning that seventeen of these supermarkets’ gluten free 'own-brand' products were, in fact, not gluten-free, including crumpets, scones and coriander naan breads.

It followed earlier news that an Edinburgh-based supplier had discovered some of its gluten-free ranges likely contained that protein, although apparently at levels deemed low-risk to coeliac sufferers.

How can these mistakes be avoided?

These six examples highlight the perils of food manufacturing mistakes, thankfully none resulted in fatalities, but all did result in damage to the brands involved.

Such mistakes can often be avoided, or at least negated, by the successful implementation of an ERP system. This will allow you to make your production processes more accurate and more efficient, and build in tools for diagnosis and timely solutions if things do go wrong.

Takeaways:

The problems outlined above, and those like them, can be avoided by:

• Maintaining accurate records
• Ensuring adherence to processes
• Ensuring that there is a system of alerts in place should any aspects of the supply chain breakdown

ERP systems can help your business, no matter which industry you are in, avoid PR disasters such as those outlined above, as well as enabling you to constantly refine and improve your processes.

To discover more about what ERP systems can mean for your business download our free eGuide: ERP Software - what is it and what does it mean to you?: A guide for manufacturers